The elephant in the room: racism in representations, relationships and rituals

Abstract

Racism touches many of the relationships created by the international development industry, but has been largely ignored by policy and academic studies. Like its historical precursors, it is in conversation with other forms of inequality based on class, gender, ethnicity and caste. Generalized representations of ‘racial’groups are pervasive and can be trivial in impact. But when combined with exclusionary social networks and rituals, and used to justify white-dominated power structures, the result can be systematic discrimination against people based on their racial identity. With examples from encounters between staff working in development in international agencies, networks, governments and national organizations in Latin America, Africa and Asia, we illustrate how racism is played out. We suggest that such observations emphasize the need to decentralize power to the South and that the subject deserves more thorough investigation.

Local in Practice: Professional Distinctions in Angolan Development Work

“…Such research advances our critical understandings of how inequalities can be reproduced by those who suffer their constraint, as also happens in the reproduction of social class more broadly (e.g., Willis ). Gender and race inequalities in development work have already occasioned analyses that find the development industry is not immune to those globally diffused social hierarchies of difference despite its commitments to social justice (Benton in press; Crewe and Fernando ; Roth ; Verma ). The example I provide here is distinct in that it is generated within the industry itself, though it clearly recalls and is likely a reverberation of “earlier organizations of social division and classifications of human value” through coeval ideas of race, territorial belonging, and capacity for self‐governance (Thomas and Clarke :306).…”

‘Demonising discourse’: The Traveller Community's struggle against the elite voice of RTÉ

“…The social knowledge that viewers acquire, conditions the way that they think about themselves and about those around them. The media taps into and exploits peoples' fears of 'the other' (van Dijk 2005;Crewe and Fernando 2006;Schneeweis 2012). Chilton (2004) stresses the necessity to examine the political interactions that take place in mediated conversations and debates; he sees that the importance of these interactions lies in the power of speech acts.…”

Contested Credit Landscapes: microcredit, self-help and self-determination in rural Bangladesh

“…That race permeates every aspect of development from its history and discourse (Wilson 2012;Power 2006;Pailey 2020; da Silva 2014), agenda setting (Kothari 2006a;White 2002White , 2006, targeted programmatic interventions (Wilson 2015), staffing (Kothari 2005) and the everyday encounters of development practice (Crewe and Fernando 2006) cannot be disputed. yet Kothari (2006b) shows that race in the work of critical development scholarship (namely, dependency theory and post-development theory) was often implied and did not appear as an analytical lens through which hierarchies of knowledge embedded in the development industry, and in concepts of progress, were seen.…”